Sunday, January 24, 2010

IPCC Admits It Lied About Glaciers Doomsday Forecasts

The IPCC (UN's climate change center) recently admitted that its predictions that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 were... errr.. false. But its head, Dr Rajendra Pachauri refused to resign, although he also admitted there might be other errors in the 2007 report. He also threw his team under the bus by saying it wasn't his fault, but "a collective failure by a number of people".

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Isn't this typical? An official UN report on which policy decision are supposed to be made was based on a media interview with one person? Isn't this like basing our energy policy on an Al Gore fictional movie? Oh wait... it is!

But there's even more. Apparently, even that glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, claims he's been erroneously quoted. He didn't say the glaciers will disappear, but they will shrink. And here's the good part. He said that glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.